The following article is contributed by Waseem Altaf The Indian Muslim In his book “The Last Mughal”, William Dalrymple documents the dismantling of the Indian Muslim aristocracy in the bloody aftermath of the revolution of 1857. Even though Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal, was a reluctant figurehead for the anti-British movement, the Muslim community as a whole was held responsible by a vengeful British Empire. Entire neighborhoods in Delhi were leveled, and thousands of Muslims hanged, shot or blown from the mouths of canons. Many others, including Bahadur Shah Zafar, were exiled to die in penury. Traumatized, Muslims turned inwards. As Western education became a requirement for government jobs, few Muslims could compete. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan tried to change this mindset with his Aligarh University, but by and large, Muslims were unable to reconcile to their loss of power to the British. Psychologically, many traditional Muslims felt they would be formally acknowledging their defeat by accepting the ways of their conquerors. Hindus, on the other hand, had no such hang-ups and were soon manning many positions in the bureaucracy. Influential Muslim clerics, including those at the Deoband seminary, blamed eclectic Mughal rule that embraced Hindu influences for their decline. Their powerful message was that Muslims could only regain power by returning to the original and pure faith of the early Islamic period. This is their message still. According to Dalrymple, the seeds of partition were sown in those violent post-1857 days. Even though the Muslim elite became progressively westernized as the Raj became more entrenched, the vast majority stuck to the old ways, sending boys to madressahs, and keeping girls at home. Hindus, on the other hand, profited from an expanding public school system. When partition came, a large section of the Muslim leadership and the professional class moved to the newly created state of Pakistan. The vast majority of Muslims left behind were poorly educated and demoralized. With their loyalties divided, the post-1947 generation of Indian Muslims were baffled by events, and clung to the ways they knew, forming ghettos against an India ruled by Hindus for the first time in centuries. Few Muslims could read and write Hindi, and were soon left far behind. Later, a very large part of Muslim middle class left India, courtesy “Partition.” There were bureaucrats, lawyers, teachers, and entrepreneurs who hoped that in a Muslim state they would be free of competition from the more populous Hindus. Their flight proved a disaster for India; for the Muslims left behind in India lacked an enlightened and educated leadership. Another factor was the patronage by Congress of Muslims’ who were religious and reactionary rather than liberal and secular. This was not always so. Jawaharlal Nehru had placed much faith in two outstanding, and progressive-minded, Muslim politicians, Sheikh Abdullah and Said-ud-din Tyabji. However, the Sheikh fell prey to his own ambition, seeking to become the king of an independent Kashmir rather than the democratic leader of all of India’s Muslims. And Tyabji died young. While Nehru at least sought to cultivate the modern Muslim, the Congress of Indira, Rajiv, and Sonia Gandhi consistently favored the conservative sections of the community. When one of its member of parliament, Arif Mohammed Khan, was willing to bat in public for the reform of Muslim personal laws, Rajiv dumped him in favor of the mullahs. The trend continued, with the current Congress leadership likewise choosing to offer subsidies and sops to Muslim religious institutions rather than encourage them to engage with the modern world. BJP on the other hand never really treated the Muslims as full-fledged citizens of the land. Thus, the hand of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad laid behind some of the worst communal riots in independent India, for example, Bhagalpur in 1989, Bombay in 1992, and Gujarat in 2002, when, in all cases, an overwhelming majority of the victims were Muslims. Presently there are 2.32% Christians, 2% Sikhs, 0.77% Buddhists, 0.5% Jains and O.43% oth¬ers in India, while Muslims constitute the largest minority comprising 13.4% of the total population. (80.5% Indians are Hindus). On the other hand apathy of the Muslims’ itself is largely responsible for the present plight of Muslims, especially in the field of education. National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions Chairman retired Justice M S A Siddiqui said that the Muslim community in the country was not serious in improving its social and educational backwardness. The Muslim elites are only interested in getting as much out of the establishment for themselves as they can—seats in Parliament, minister-ships, postings as ambassadors and members of various commissions and so on. They care nothing at all for the Muslim masses. They have absolutely no spirit of charity and social involvement. The demands that most Muslim organizations make vis-à-vis the state have tended to be identity-related, rather than substantive, such as in terms of Muslim economic and educational empowerment, promoting modern education, combating the obscurantism of the mullahs, or encouraging women’s empowerment, such as through reforming Muslim Personal Law. According to Sachar Committee Report, only 8%of urban Muslims are part of the formal sector as against 21% of all Indian city dwellers. 31% of Muslims live below the poverty line, close to the 35pc for Dalits and Adivasis. It appears that while the fertility rate in India is falling, the rate among Muslims is falling more slowly. A new study by an American think-tank, the US-India Policy Institute, assessing progress since the Sachar report, bluntly concludes that Muslims have “not shown any measurable improvement”. Even in education, Muslims’ gains are typically more modest than other groups’. ( Material for this article was compiled from different sources)
Posted on: Thu, 20 Mar 2014 15:35:41 +0000
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